Saturday, July 26, 2008

Some code we never go back to. Like Java's Hello World... it has a main method which takes arguments and it always looks a little daunting. At Cavdar.net someone had a bright idea and uses a static initialiser block to print "Hello World", and then promptly exits to stop the JVM looking for the main method and giving an error. I, for one, welcome our new "Hello World" overlords...

Google Mail had what someone must have thought was a neat behavior. Exchange mail with people and pow, they are added to your contacts. Of course, in real life, that doesn't work. You get a contact list full of crapola addresses, which devalues your contact list which is dumb. So the good news is that is in a future release, Google is getting rid of the dumb. Now, there's "Suggested Contacts" and the ability to pick and choose who becomes your contacts.

And there's another thing to think about.... Is this the start of more controllable contact management for Google's services, making it social networking without the ninjas and spammers? One can hope.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Well, I had been working away on Pocket Lendery for the iPhone, and it was coming along nicely but what with me getting a proper job and all, it had slipped a bit.

And then the iPhone App Store opened and there was Circulator from the fine chaps at Coding Monkeys. Circulator looks like a fine app and just reminds me of some things I forgot from my spec.

Still, there's plenty of code in the Pocket Lendery code base, and I'll keep on working on it till it scratches my own itch. I will then release it as an open sourced project (unless you are reading this, are an iPhone coder or want to be, and want to help on the project in which case, mail me)...

I can't think of a better way to keep the Coding Monkeys on their toes than having an open source project snapping at their heels.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Google Browser Sync, or at least the client part, has been open sourced. I think the idea of porting the server to Google App Engine has potential, but lets see how the community builds around it first.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Google squirt a lot of data internally between a lot of different services written in different languages. The data format between these services has been tricky to manage. The default response is "use XML" but XML makes the data bigger and more costly to parse. Google's solution is Google Protocol Buffers. Create a .proto file to describe the data contained by a message you want to pass. Run a compiler and you get the Java, Python or C++ code you need to read and write messages with that protocol. Now go wire up your services. All under an Apache 2.0 License. Worth checking out; and it'll be interesting to see how long before that range of languages supported expands.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Thursday, July 03, 2008

I think anyone who makes a dialog window pop up with text along the lines of "Something hasn't worked, see http://example.org/blah/blah/blah for more details" and then makes the URL non clickable and also makes the text unselectable so the user can't copy and paste, needs to have control-C/control-V disabled on their computers and see how they like it.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Where a monitor has umpteen inputs, and you can switch between the inputs using but a single button to cycle through them, I want a menu which lets me select wether or not I cycle through each input. So on my monitor here which has DVI-1,DVI-2,DisplayPort,HDMI,Component,Svideo,Composite,VGA... I could turn off everything but DVI-1 and HDMI, so rather than 3 and 5 button presses to change input, it would we 1 button press. Come on Mr Monitor maker; I'm really looking at you Mr Dell, make it real eh?